Publication details

Relaxing Underspecified Semantic Representations for Reinterpretation

Alexander Koller, Joachim Niehren, Kristina Striegnitz

Proceedings of the Sixth Meeting on Mathematics of Language (MOL6), pp. 74--87, University of Central Florida, July 1999

Type and sort conflicts in semantics are usually resolved by a process of reinterpretation. Recently, Egg (1999) has proposed an
alternative account in which conflicts are avoided by
underspecification. The main idea is to derive sufficiently relaxed
underspecified semantic representations; addition of reinterpretation
operators then simply is further specialization. But in principle,
relaxing underspecified representations bears the danger of
overgeneration. In this paper, we investigate this problem in the
framework of CLLS, where underspecified representations are expressed
by tree descriptions subsuming dominance constraints. We introduce
some novel properties of dominance constraints and present a safety
criterion that ensures that an underspecified description can be
relaxed without adding unwanted readings. We then apply this criterion
systematically to Egg's analysis and show why its relaxation operation
does not lead to overgeneration.